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Foraging and Cooking Mushrooms, Wild and Obscure Food

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Dryad Saddle | Pheasant Back | Cerioporus squamosus

Young dryad saddle or pheasant back mushrooms

Pheasant Back Fermented Soy Sauce

Fermented pheasant back or dryad saddle shoyu recipe with koji

Prime pheasant back season is usually about over after the spring chicken of the woods pop, but just because they’re big and tough as nails doesn’t mean you can’t do anything with them, and pheasant back shoyu is a great example, especially if you like edible science projects. Shoyu and it’s cousin tamari (soy sauces…

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Meatball Stew with Pheasant Backs and Campion

Meatball Stew with Pheasant Backs and Campion recipe

Meatball stew with pheasant back mushrooms and campion is a dish I came up with after I’d been reading about campion, and how it, and it’s relatives (mostly Silene vulgaris and Silene inflata) are used widely in Mediterranean cooking. The recipe itself is a sort of hodge-podge of different ingredients you might see in European…

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Braised Burdock and Wild Mushrooms

Braised burdock and pheasant back mushrooms recipe

Ever since I figured out a reasonably efficient way to dig burdock roots, I’ve been eating it every which way. Kinpira was my real breakthrough. Sure, I opened up a restaurant featuring burdock as a local ingredient, but back then I cooked it like a European would, generally with dairy, which is fine, but the…

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Basic Pheasant Back Broth

Dryad saddle or pheasant back mushroom broth recipe

After morel season as we get into summer, the pheasant back / dryad saddle / Cerioporus squamosus will still be out, not in the staggering numbers we see during the height of the late spring season, but still out and plentiful. They’re not spring mushrooms though, and finding tender, succulent ones is far more difficult…

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Wild Shoot Salad with Dryad Saddle and Wild Mint

Fiddlehead, asparagus, smilax and hop shoots with dryad saddle or pheasant back mushrooms and wild mint

Here’s a great, off-the-beaten path salad I did for episode 2 of The Wild Harvest, my online series with James Beard Award winning filmmaker Jesse Roesler. The salad itself is great, but moreso to me it’s a statement about how we perceive vegetables in general, specifically shoot vegetables. When you think of a shoot, what…

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Nettle Pancakes with Goat Cheese and Wild Mushrooms

Stinging nettle pancakes recipe with pheasant back mushrooms and venison bacon

Wait, nettle what? Yep, stinging nettle pancakes. Savory pancakes were a vegetarian standby at a couple different restaurants I worked at, and Chef Russell Klein of James Beard nominated Meritage in St. Paul ran a version of them on their menu that often stayed most of the year, changing up the flavors as the seasons…

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Dryad Saddles with Garlic, Soy, and Onion Greens

Dryad saddle mushrooms with ginger, soy, and onion greens recipe

A quick saute of dryad saddles (Cerioporus squamosus / pheasant back) with garlic, soy and a healthy handful of onion leaves is probably my new favorite way to eat these spring mushrooms that are so abundant during morel season, and especially nice to see when the morels are hiding. Their flavor is so funky and…

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Asparagus and Fiddleheads with Shaved Dryad Saddle

Asparagus and fiddleheads with shaved dryad saddle mushrooms recipe

This week I’ve been working on a side that evokes spring and also happens to be a great way to use those dryad saddles/pheasant back mushrooms that come up with abandon in the Spring. I was in the kitchen wondering what to do with some fiddleheads Hidden Stream Farm brought me, and I wound up…

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Dryad Saddle Relish

Dryad saddle or pheasant back mushroom relish

It’s springtime again, and with it comes the onslaught of Dryad saddle, a.k.a pheasant back mushrooms here in Minnesota. With so many fresh ingredients available at once, I often preserve things to make sure everything gets used and to save time and shelf life of stuff I’ve worked so hard to pick. This preserve I…

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Dryad Saddle Ramen

Dryad Saddle Mushroom Ramen With Wild Spring Vegetables_

It was a bad year for morels for me. There’s a couple kids speaking an Eastern European language that raid the patch in the morning, looking for the”smorchki”. If having children with 1000 generations of mushroom hunting in their veins picking my favorite patch wasn’t bad enough, there’s a groundskeeper that’s found that patch too…

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Dryad Saddle Broth, Spring Mushrooms And Vegetables

Dryad saddle mushroom soup with morels, wood ear, and pluteus mushrooms

  If pressed, many people, when presented with an array of wild mushrooms to eat and sample, would probably say that they all taste, “like mushrooms”. It is the same with many of the most coveted foods in the world. Expensive and prized Wine, cheese, beer, cured meat, fish and caviar all may taste a…

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Dryad’s Saddle or Pheasant Back Mushroom

Dryad Saddle or Pheasant Back Mushrooms_

“Is this a dryad saddle? and Can I eat it? Are such common questions in online mushrooms groups they’re like a meme, I don’t know of any other mushroom that people ask about more frequently, at least in my area. The Dryad’s saddle or Cerioporus squamosus, formerly known as Polyporus squamosus, are a mushroom with…

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Wild Mushroom Confit

dryads saddle pheasant back edible wild mushroom

Traditionally, confit denotes meat that has been marinated in salt and herbs, then slowly and gently cooked in its own fat, the end result being a nice and meltingly tender piece of meat. For this preparati0n I use the word confit to express the end result and texture, soft juicy, and full of flavor. Hands…

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Sam Thayer dropped 25 lbs of his highbush cranberr Sam Thayer dropped 25 lbs of his highbush cranberry cultivars (3 types!) on me before the last snowfall and I honestly don’t even know where to start after processing them. I’d already made jams and hot sauce already and I have enough for a year. 😅

Great time to practice the cold-juice which ensures the juice isn’t bitter. 

Anyone else have any ideas? 

You can still find some on the shrubs if the birds didn’t get them up by the north shore. 

#highbushcranberry #winterforaging #birdberries #sweetnectar #foragerproblems #juiceme #embarassmentofriches #wildfoodlove
100% wild candy bars. I don’t usually make raw v 100% wild candy bars. I don’t usually make raw vegan snacks, but when I read about Euell Gibbon’s wild hackberry candy bars I had to try them. The  originals were just crushed hackberries and hickory nuts, but, I’ve read that Euell grew to dislike the crunch of hackberry seeds later in life. 

Here’s the thing though, if you sift the hackberry flour, you get a fun texture, with no worries about cracking a tooth. 

These are equal parts ground hackberries, dried wild blueberries, and hickory nuts, with a splash of maple syrup to bind.

The end product is a shelf stable, nutrient-packed bite filled with protein, carbohydrates, fats and natural sugars infinitely adaptable to your local landscape.

The texture is chewy and nougat-like, and now I’m curious to see how they’d perform baked in recipes that use frangipane or almond paste. 

#euellgibbons #energybars #hackberry #crushin #paleobreakfast #tradionalfood #wildfoodlove #rawfoods
Hackberry milk spoonbread with black walnuts and c Hackberry milk spoonbread with black walnuts and chokecherry gastrique is one of the dishes @credononfiction and I filmed for @headspace. 

I cook hackberry milk with cornmeal and maple syrup, whip some egg whites and fold them in, then bake. Eats a bit like crust-less pumpkin pie, if pumpkin pie came from a tree. 

#hackberry #souffle #wildfoodlove #chokecherry #blackwalnuts #brunching
Hackberry milk is a sort of rustic nut milk made f Hackberry milk is a sort of rustic nut milk made from ground hackberries and water. I grind the berries to a meal, then simmer with 3x their volume of water, strain through a chinois (without pressing) season with maple and a pinch of cinnamon. Tastes like pumpkin pie in a glass, also a decent cooking medium. 

#hackberries #nutmilk #foraging #wildfoodlove #celtisoccidentalis
Are hackberries a fruit? A nut? They're a bit of b Are hackberries a fruit? A nut? They're a bit of both. They also contain protein, fat, and carbs, and the oldest evidence of humans enjoying them goes back 500,000 years. Right now is the best time to harvest them in the Midwest as the leaves have fallen. The full break down and introduction to them is in my bio. 
#hackberry #celtisoccidentalis #winterforaging #wildfoodlove #traditionalfoods #manbird
If you’re in the Twin Cities the nocino I collab If you’re in the Twin Cities the nocino I collaborated on with @ida_graves_distillery for 2020 is on the shelves @surdyksliquor along with our spruce tip liquor. I’d give it a couple weeks before they sell out. 

Brock did a good job on this one: mellow flavor that almost reminds me of a tootsie roll, with spices and mellow tannins. 

#nocino #liquor #distillery #craftspirits #blackwalnuts #mnwinter
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